Month: October 2024

According to the Society of Family Planning, the number of abortions in the US went up after a dozen different states passed near-total abortion bans. The increase is entirely due to the growth of telehealth:

What's more surprising is that abortion bans haven't even reduced abortions in the states where they're banned. Women in those states have either traveled out of state or obtained abortion medication. The New York Times has the data:

Abortion bans produced a rush to make telehealth and medication easier and cheaper to get. Ironically, the result seems to have been a higher awareness of these alternatives and a net increase in abortions. The Supreme Court should never have poked the bear.

Vladimir Putin is doing whatever he can to help Donald Trump win:

U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday said Russians seeking to disrupt the U.S. elections created a faked video and other material smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.... They added that Russian government agencies and contractors, which generally seek to boost Republican former president Donald Trump’s campaign, are considering trying to instigate physical violence in the fraught period after voters cast their ballots.

....Russia is “potentially seeking to stoke threats towards poll workers, as well as amplifying protests and potentially encouraging protests to be violent,” the official added.

Why is Putin so enamored of Trump? Lots of reasons, but I suppose the biggest one right now is that he thinks Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine and guarantee a Russian victory. If I were Putin, I suppose I'd prefer Trump too.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a long piece in the Atlantic today about Donald Trump's enduring contempt for the military. But maybe you're too busy to read the whole thing. So how about just the quotes?

1. About the funeral for a soldier killed at Fort Hood: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican! Don’t pay it!”
2. About the supposedly shaky loyalty of his top officers: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
3. About the Presidential Medal of Freedom: “It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
4. About military service: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”
5. About the dangers of promiscuous sex: “It is a dangerous world out there. It's like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider.”
6. About the George Floyd protests: “The Chinese generals would know what to do.”
7. About his generals after they resisted shooting protesters: “You are all fucking losers!”
8. About his generals again: “My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”
9. About Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”
10. About John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
11. About lowering the White House flag to half staff after McCain's death: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.”
12. About soldiers who volunteered for service in Afghanistan: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
13. About a visit to a WWII cemetery in France: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
14. About wounded veterans appearing in parades: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me.”
15. About a wounded veteran singing "God Bless America" at the installation ceremony of Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Two weeks to go.

There aren't a lot of undecided voters left at this point, but there are some—and they might end up being decisive if they can be turned against Donald Trump. So I keep wondering: What could we tell them about Trump that they don't already know?

In other words, forget about the fascism, the lying, the racism, and the bizarre rally speeches. They probably already know all that stuff and it hasn't done the trick. So what's left?

College Board has just published its latest university tuition figures, which gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite charts. This time I'll just look at the past decade:

Average tuition actually charged after standard discounts has dropped 2% since last year and has gone down 40% over the past ten years.

For private universities, actual tuition has gone down 12% over the past ten years.

College Board has been publishing these figures annually for a long time, but you've probably never seen them anywhere but here. Why?

POSTSCRIPT: Just to be clear, the "actual cost" in the chart is an average based on outright grant awards that offset published tuition prices. For public universities, the average grant in 2024 was about $9,000, but that varies. Poor people get more and rich people get less.

The price of gasoline has dropped 14% over the past six months.

Two views of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. The top one is a panoramic shot taken from about ten feet away—or so it seemed. The square surrounding the cathedral is a very tight space. I shopped the image massively to eliminate keystoning (converging vertical lines due to aiming the camera upward).

The bottom image was taken from inside the Prater wheel.

From an Emerson poll a few days ago:

“Voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60% to 36%,” Kimball said. “The three percent of voters who said they could still change their mind currently favor Harris, 48% to 43%.”

This gibes with my belief that most people who haven't already committed to Trump are likely to vote for Harris when they finally make a decision. We'll see.

One of the key questions about gender-affirming care among teenagers is: do they regret it later? A new study of both puberty blockers and hormone therapy shows that regret rates are extremely low a few years after the treatment has begun:

The data analyzed survey responses from more than 200 people who are part of the TransYouth Project, one of the largest and longest community-based studies on the experiences of transgender youths. The majority of respondents expressed satisfaction with the gender-affirming care they received, with only 4 percent — nine respondents — expressing some form of regret.

That's from the Washington Post's write-up. Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy when it comes to studies like these. This one has a decent, though not spectacular, sample size, and an excellent retention rate. Almost nobody dropped out along the way. But there's also this from the study itself:

The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.

In other words, nearly all the children in this study had been socially transitioned for many years before they began medical treatment. This is probably the most treatment friendly sample it's possible to get.

So once again we have a study of trans kids that doesn't really tell us much. It does suggest that medical interventions are probably OK for kids who are especially certain about their identity, and that's good to know. But for everyone else we're still in need of rigorous studies to guide policy going forward.

Megan McArdle picks at a scab of mine today:

It’s hard to pick just one favorite form of internet insanity, but, if I had to, it would definitely be shoplifting denialism.

Over the last few years, shoplifting has clearly become a bigger problem. We’ve seen videos of brazen shoplifters casually walking off with goods while helpless security guards watch. Retailers tell us it’s a problem, one that’s forcing them to close some of the hardest-hit stores. If you live in one of those areas, it’s also visible in your daily shopping: the locked cases at your drugstore, the signs banning knapsacks or oversize totes, the armed guard who recently appeared at the exit of my local supermarket, checking receipts.

This is all true. Why would drugstores lock up toothpaste if shoplifting weren't a real problem? On the other hand, FBI crime statistics don't show a huge surge:

Shoplifting has gone up by a quarter since 2021, but it's still no higher than it was in 2017. However, I had to extrapolate this data myself and it might not be right. What's more, it's possible that retailers have mostly given up reporting shoplifting to the police since it does little good. Even the FBI admits that clearance rates are generally below 10%.

But there's also this:

This doesn't come from police reports. It comes from an annual survey of retailers by their own industry group. They have every incentive to report accurate numbers.

But there are problems here too. First, "shrink" includes losses from shoplifting, employee theft, and operational errors. Maybe it's steady because shoplifting went up and the others went down. Who knows?

Second, maybe shoplifting really has stayed steady, but it's because of the locked cabinets, surveillance systems, and guards at the door. There's no sure way to tease out causality.

What to think? It sometimes happens that widespread anecdotal evidence flatly doesn't match the best statistical data. This is one of those cases. So what's the best bet: trust the statistics or trust the anecdotes?

The case for statistics is that they really do tend to be reliable on a nationwide basis. The case for anecdotes is that they can identify trends faster and at a more granular level.

The case against statistics is that they're bloodless and don't always capture the full scope of things. The case against anecdotes is that media coverage can amplify limited local events into broad moral panics that don't represent reality. In turn, this can motivate businesses announcing weak results to blame everything on the excuse du jour—in this case shoplifting—because that's better than admitting you're managing the business poorly.

This has all been a longwinded way of saying that I find this particular issue perplexing. The anecdotal evidence really does look convincing, but maybe it's only capturing isolated incidents in a few high-crime cities. And why doesn't it show up in any of the data?

I don't know.